I wasn’t angry at Firaxis, though. During game development, there’s no such thing as a bad idea. An idea becomes bad only once it has shipped. Prior to that, it’s just an idea. During development, it can be expanded, removed, or altered in such a way that it barely resembles the original concept. For this reason, a potentially bad idea can go unnoticed for longer than you might expect, and that’s okay. What matters is catching the bad idea before you ship. Firaxis did that. The quest to save your people’s genetic purity from a bunch of filthy cyborgs never made it into the final game. The only person who failed was me. I rewrote a quest that made me extremely uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that I stopped writing the game.
If you want be angry at someone, look no further. I will always be your guy.
* * *
MONTHS LATER, I WAS still looking for a full-time project. Beyond Earth was behind me. I was at a new developer, which will remain nameless. The studio’s in-house writer was explaining their game’s opening sequence. I looked across the table to Carlito. His face echoed what I was feeling: so much of the opening sequence was wrong.
I don’t mean it was bad or trite; I wasn’t looking at it subjectively. I mean the sequence accomplished the opposite of what the developer intended. They wanted the player to feel powerful and in control but had designed a scenario in which the player is forced to run for their life. My instinct was to stop the writer’s presentation and explain the misstep so the team could go about fixing it.
There was a familiar excitement in the team’s eyes. I could see they were in love with the idea. They thought it was stage-ready, and nothing would convince them otherwise.
I already knew what came next. I would point out the mistake; they would get defensive and reject our feedback. Their rejection would offend me on some primal level, and I would write them off as incompetent. We would struggle for power until the end. They would despise me, and I would lose another year inside a hotel room, trying to move the needle a few centimeters for a game I didn’t even care that much about.
Wait. This isn’t right. We’ve done this already.
Yes, I had. And I was so very tired.
I picked up my BlackBerry and sent an email to Carlito. “I don’t want to fight anymore. Let them do what they want.”
* * *
NINE YEARS AFTER WALKING through its door in an ill-advised suit, I said good-bye to 2K Games. When the familiar faces are outnumbered by the new, it’s time to go.
Geekjock left for WB, where he now produces some of the best AAA games I’ve ever played. Bruce, the Persian goat snake of PR, stayed in New York instead of following us to California. He left the industry after that, choosing to pursue a law degree and learn circus gymnastics. Lily also jumped ship and moved back east. These days, she’s a VP at a popular Internet company and couldn’t be happier. Bonnie quit after she got married and realized being a mom is actually fun when you’re raising a kid instead of a dev team. She came back four years later and is now director of development for an indie studio that focuses on experimental, sustainable development. Young Philippe left 2K Publishing to fulfill his dream of being a game designer. He worked on Mafia III for a bit before spinning off to join Jordan Thomas’s indie studio, Question LLC. I’ve heard from mutual friends that D. T. is doing well. We haven’t spoken in years. I reached out, but never heard back.
Carlito is still Carlito, for the most part. His body has been worked to the brink so many times that it now requires routine maintenance for things like staph infections, nerve damage, and the occasional spinal surgery. He’s more machine now than man, which is why I’m sure he’ll outlive us all. Carlito will never get the recognition he deserves, but the games we play are better because he’s still out there doing what has to be done.
The last time I saw the Fox was at my apartment in Oakland, a month after my daughter was born. It was awkward and a little bittersweet. I didn’t know what to say to this man who gave me a chance when I was just twenty-three and was now meeting my daughter before I packed up my entire life and moved back to Louisiana. I still don’t know what to say.
You might think a video-game company is defined by its games, but really it comes down to the people who create them. A company is just an idea whose boundaries are defined by paperwork and red tape. Its heart and mind are the people who work there. A great company is not a well-oiled machine; rather, it is a collection of seemingly incompatible pieces, soldered together to create something better, stronger, and faster than the sum of its parts. It may be a little messy, but so are video games. Like all art, games are an expression of the people who make them; people who are unique, derivative, functional, broken, and above all, messy.
These people were my coworkers and my family. Good and bad, I owe them everything.
Epilogue
* * *
NEW GAME PLUS
Looking back, I can see where I began to pull away from the games industry. While living in Dallas, I’d reconnected with Katie, whom I had dated in college. Katie wasn’t interested in video games. She respected them and understood their importance in my life, but that was the extent of it. When I talked about games with her, it wasn’t a hobby or a passion, it was just my job. It may not seem like much, but it was enough to make me engage with the real world. Katie encouraged me to disconnect from work and interact with new people. It started slow; just leaving the apartment once a day for lunch. After a couple weeks, I was taking daily walks to grocery stores and coffee shops. Soon, I was visiting family, bowling with friends, attending plays, taking vacations. She reminded me what it meant to have a life, and to actually live it. I think that was the most important part. For a long time, the people closest to me were those who loved work as much as I did. Spending Saturday or Sunday in the office didn’t seem strange when your friends were there, too.
It would have been easy to slip back into my old routine when I returned to working full time in 2K’s California office. But with Katie there, I had an anchor to the outside world. Instead of obsessing over projects, she and I were making new friends, spending weekends in Napa, attending all-day board-game parties, getting married, honeymooning on Kauai, gorging ourselves on chicken wings, hiking in Big Sur, riding party trains to Reno, tracking down lobster rolls, watching the sun set over Oakland. Turns out the Bay Area is an amazing place when you can enjoy it with the right person.
After all that good living, work just wasn’t fun anymore. I left 2K and went to work for a start-up, but it wasn’t any better. I was simply tired of making games. When Katie and I found out she was pregnant, we packed our bags and headed south. Back home in Louisiana, I’d write this book; my final contribution to the game industry. Then, I would open a sandwich shop. There’s a small piece of undeveloped commercial property on the side of a road in Monroe, Louisiana. No more than a hundred feet all around, just enough room for a shack and a picnic table. There would be no designers, no players; just hungry people looking for a brief moment of happiness, one sandwich at a time. That would have been a good life, but it wouldn’t have been mine.
As we were preparing to leave San Francisco, I received a call from Mark Thompson and J-F Poirier, the game director and executive producer at EA Motive in Montreal. I thought there was nothing they could offer that would pull me back in.
“We’re curious if you’d be interested in writing Star Wars.”
I was an idiot to think I could give this up.
Ten months later, after a brief stop in a galaxy far, far away, I’m in Louisiana, hard at work on the next chapter of my life. There’s a concept in video games called New Game Plus. Sometimes, after you beat a game, you can choose to start over from the beginning. You’ll keep the skills you gained during your first play-through, but the game’s difficulty will be greatly increased. That’s what I’m working on now—my New Game Plus.
I’m starting a new studio with James Stewart, a brilliant programmer and engineer from my hometown of Bossier City–Shreveport. We bot
h worked at 2K for years but didn’t meet until my final day at the company. Now, we’ve both come home to build a Louisiana studio inspired by the filmmaker Roger Corman. Corman is known for shooting entire films in just a few days with almost no budget. He works fast, sometimes producing up to nine films a year. If he rented a film set for seven days but finished filming in five, he’d use the last two days to make a second movie. Sets, props, actors, all carried over from one film to the next. His method is fast, focused, and straight from the hip. Having spent years on AAA games, fretting over every decision, James and I think Roger Corman is a goddamn hero.
It’s time the video-game industry had a solid, trash-pop, B-grade developer churning out games that are cheap and strange. We’d love to be that for you; that is, if we don’t fail gloriously. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t worry me. But if there’s one thing I learned as a twenty-three-year-old kid who moved to New York with nothing but a suitcase, it’s that anything is possible when you’re too naïve to realize you’re screwed.
I still work too much; usually seven days a week. There’s no helping that. If I go longer than two days without writing, depression sets in. There’s something about making these keys go clickity-clack that’s better than any drug or drink. I love it, except for when I hate it, which is a lot less often than it used to be. As I write this, I can hear my wife eating dinner in the kitchen, her fork scraping against a plate. My daughter is crying, probably because she tried to grab the dog’s ears and he ran away. Life is waiting for me at the end of this book, and I try to not stay gone for too long.
There are thirty-five games lined up on a shelf next to my desk, the result of ten years of work by me and at least a thousand other developers. Eleven of those games are unplayable on modern consoles. In another decade, who knows how many more? Video games are technologically dependent. If the bombs ever drop, they’ll be completely wiped out. There will be nothing left for archeologists to discover. We video-game developers will not share the grand stage of human history. Even if our medium persists until the stars die out, the games we make now won’t be around to see it. They are temporary, like us. It’s their impermanence that makes them truly unique. Games, as an art form, reflect humanity by embodying our mortality, self-indulgence, and delusions. They are digital performance art, capable of imprinting messages onto our memories as easily as they’re received from real-life experiences. In this way, games are more than entertainment. Even though you and I may never meet, our lives have already overlapped. We’ve known the fear and isolation of Metroid’s alien planet, Zebes. In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, we hid in the grass of Pripyat and held our breath as enemy soldiers passed by not ten feet away. We have felt our fingers begin to slip as we clung to the wing of a giant bird in Shadow of the Colossus. Games let us transcend our subjective points of view and come together in a life of shared moments.
Now that I’m free to create anything I want, it’s more important than ever that I make something worthwhile. When an idea grips me and won’t let go, I ask myself one question. Is it worth abandoning my real world to create this fake one? The question I’ve stopped asking is, What does the player want? There are seven billion people on this planet, all of whom are potentially the Player. I’m not masochistic enough to lump the entire spectrum of humanity into a singular entity—the Player—just so I can spend my life trying to please it. Player interaction and gameplay are important, but on their own, they don’t create meaningful experiences. Gameplay requires context and consequence beyond simply beating the game. Without them, the player’s actions carry no emotional weight.
As developers, we have to abandon the idea that an action is just a tool. It’s easy to think that way when you distill a game to its most basic elements. An enemy is just an obstacle. Jumping, punching, running, shooting—those are tools the player can use to overcome that obstacle. But viewing a game this way robs the work, and the players, of their humanity. To shoot, stab, or punch is a choice. And our choices define us. They reveal who we are, what we stand for, and how far we’re willing to go. Why should it be any different for the characters we play in our video games? In Spec Ops: The Line, Captain Walker doesn’t shoot people because he wants to defeat Konrad, just as I don’t write video games solely to make money. Walker uses lethal force because he wants to be a good man. In his head, every bullet he fires makes the world a little safer. I write games because I want to be someone else. When I work, I can inhabit a character and forget all about my fears and insecurities. These flaws make us human. To keep games fresh and feeling new, we need to embrace that humanity, to pour every ounce of pride, jealousy, and insecurity into our work, to choke the player with honesty until they’re gagging for breath.
Many independent games already do this. They don’t have the large staff or outrageous budgets of AAA, meaning they’re not usually beholden to a larger company. With that comes freedom. That Dragon, Cancer is an autobiographical game by Amy and Ryan Green chronicling their son’s four-year battle with cancer. Nina Freeman’s game Cibele is based on her experiences falling in love with someone she met while playing an online video game. In The Novelist, by Kent Hudson, you play a writer who must choose between finishing his book and spending time with his neglected family. These types of stories aren’t found in AAA games; they’re too vulnerable. That’s fine. Games shouldn’t be forced to fit a single definition. Billion-dollar franchises like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed are built on empowerment, not honesty. It’s an easier sell. For that reason, they will only grow more elaborate, beautiful, and expensive. But so long as AAA games continue to focus solely on what the player wants, that growth will amount to nothing but sound and fury.
Forget that noise. We can do better.
Imagine a video game that inspires the best in us rather than the worst. Imagine exploring what it means to be human instead of revisiting how it feels to be powerful. Imagine putting down the controller and being left with a sense of hope, for you and for the world.
Imagine all of these things. Then, get to work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is very different from writing a game. The freedom that comes from a lack of designers peering over your shoulder is terrifying. Thankfully, my amazing editor, Todd Hunter, was there to guide me through the alien process of writing for myself rather than the whims of a player. I never would have made it this far without him.
Of course, none of this would have been possible if not for two people—my fantastic agent, William LoTurco, and my wife, Katie Williams—who convinced me this was a story worth telling. Katie, along with my parents, also deserves special thanks for shouldering the brunt of baby duty while I hammered out the final draft.
A huge thanks to 2K Games for allowing me the freedom to tell this story—in particular Pete Welch, who is honest but fair and wise beyond measure. To my former coworkers, whether you appear in this book or not, thanks for tolerating me throughout the years. I love you all. Yes, even you.
Thanks to Anthony Burch, Greg Kasavin, Hogarth De Le Plante, James Stewart, Jason Bergman, Ken Levine, Michael Kelly, Ryan Mattson, and Tiffany Nagano for helping fill in the blanks. To Russ Pitts, for being a bridge to all of this. To Mitch Dyer, for constantly talking me off the ledge. And, finally, to Lin-Manuel Miranda, for writing “Non-Stop,” which played on repeat as I worked to finish this book and Star Wars Battlefront II while moving across the country with a newborn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WALT WILLIAMS is an award-winning game writer best known for the acclaimed military shooter Spec Ops: The Line. He’s helped bring to life such beloved franchises as BioShock, Civilization, Borderlands, Mafia, and The Darkness. Most recently, he served as a writer on Star Wars Battlefront II, helping to usher in a new era of Star Wars video games. Significant Zero is his first book.
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